Hope
by GoddessofSnark
Summary: Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils for it prolongs the torture of man. Freidrich Nitzche.


A/N I'm a cynic, but not this much of one, but once it started, it spun out of control until it became this. It came from a quote I saw in someone's signature on a message board and thought it was somewhat inspiring. I don't own the quote or the characters, only the plot. Enjoy!

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_"Hope is the worst of all evils for it prolongs the torture of man." Freidrich Nitzche  
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He laughed at the cynical words, but it was a pathetic, resigned laugh for he knew that it was far too true. Another tumbler of scotch was poured, and another drank as he sat looking over the city. He didn't remember when exactly he had found this spot something in his memory told him college, but it could have been any time in his life, all he knew was for a long time he had come up here to sit and think and watch the world spin by.

He wasn't the only one who had come here, there were signs of plenty of others, and they all shared the spot, accepting it as something that was very private to all of them and at the same time each of them had brought something else to the spot. It was his chair he was sitting on, something that was going to be dumped into the trash but he instead had brought it up here, but there was always something else there, another thing left behind by someone else who shared that spot with them.

He had often walked by this spot and saw someone up there, never seeing who it was, never infringing on the other man's personal space, it was an unspoken rule of the unknown brotherhood they had all formed by all enjoying the same spot. If one was there, no one else dared bother, if you wanted to think you'd either save your deep thoughts and introspection for another time or another place, but he was thankful that very few seemed to share the same deep thinking hours as he did.

The moon cast a soft glow on the rooftop, along with the few stars, giving the city an eerie glow. The nightlife was just starting to kick into high gear as the younger crowd moved from place to place enjoying the warm Friday night. Another tumbler of scotch was poured and another one drank as he gave a silent toast to old man Freiderich, the one who said it all with a single line.

Hope was a horrible, horrible thing to have. He could remember a time when he was young and not nearly as cynical when he had thought hope was something wonderful that if you didn't have hope that you had nothing, but now he knew that hope was just another vice, another addiction. It was possible to be addicted to hope, and he had seen far too many people waste away their lives with that addiction.

It was a horrible horrible thing to see. Because no one ever thought it to be bad to be forever the optimist. He wouldn't call himself a pessimist, only a cynic. There's a joke out there that he thought to be all to true, that an optimist is someone who'll let their kid borrow a car for a date, a pessimist is one who won't, and a cynic is one who did. It was only a joke because so many people knew it to be true.

He had hoped once, he had been another fresh faced youth ready to take on the world, until the world took on him. He had hope that the woman he had loved would be with him his whole life, until that fell apart months into their marriage, only he was too damn busy thinking that maybe, just maybe, things would get better, that maybe after Abby was born the love return, that maybe once he got past his residency and was a full fledged doctor and not still paying off loan after loan that she would be happy with him. He had hope that the love return.

But it never did, it just got worse, until he had met _her._ The young beautiful woman who had walked into his life and he didn't want to let walk out. The he had hope again, she had renewed his hope that maybe, just maybe, he could pull himself out of a crumbling marriage and have her, that he could turn his life around her, but instead she found her love for him to be simply platonic, but it didn't stop him from hoping.

But now he had no use for the silly emotion anymore, he had already seen his hopes shattered too many times to get his hopes up again. He had lost everything in his life, the only thing keeping him going at this point was sheer spite at the world. Another tumbler of scotch was poured and another one drank, this one more viciously than the rest.

He no longer had anything. He had lost her, he had lost his first love, his daughter had grown up and moved out, he had all but lost that, and now he no longer had even his job, a job he had taken with the hope that it would be fun, that he would be better at that than anything else he had done on rotation.

There was another quote that sprang to mind, that "Hope is the bait that hides any hook." It was right as well, hope that he would have love had drawn him to his wife in the first place and she hooked him and used him and left him to dry. Hope had drawn him to his job that had done the same, a cruel wife, he had put so much into his job just for it to divorce him over one mistake. And hope had drawn him to her, baiting him, hooking him and reeling him into her only to never have him and leave him stranded.

Hope wasn't the wonderful thing everyone wanted it to be, it was an awful thing that really did prolong the torture of man. It made everything go so agonizingly slowly because with hope one would constantly think that the next day was going to get better that something was going to happen and everything that had been bad would go away.

No, he had lived through hope and he knew that it wasn't the case. Hope was a cruel evil thing that laughed at you when you wanted to count on you, it was something that would lead you in and then push you down and laugh as you struggled to get back up, but you always believed in it. Hope was an abusive spouse that you kept on loving no matter how much it hurt you you still loved it and wanted to think that it would go back to being a good thing.

Hope was something that he had long since stopped believing in. He didn't quite know when he had given up on it, he thought it could have been when she had left the first time, ran off all the way across the country to escape her problems and he realized that he ran the chance of never seeing her again. That could have been when he started to become disillusioned to hope. But then again, he did hope that she would come back, and she did.

It was one of the little things hope did to trick you, you'd hope for something and then it would happen, restoring your faith thinking that if you hope for something, if you wish for it long enough and hard enough, it'll happen, but it was just a trick, it was just something that was done so that hope could sucker you right back in for another one-two punch and put you right back on the ground again.

He figured it was about the time that the detective had walked onto the scene, the young man had her heart from the minute they had met each other, and he had seen it even if they hadn't. He had given up hoping then and started his search for someone else, and all the someone else's only furthered his hatred for hope.

First Maggie had come back, and he thought maybe he could have what they once did, but neither of them had changed, they were both the same people they had been when they had first met and that lasted just as long as their marriage had a few months, only this time they didn't put up with living through it and their sham of a marriage this time they accepted and moved on.

Lilly hadn't even counted, it was something to try to get him to regain a faith in humanity, but Maggie had come in before they had even tried to be something, she was just someone that maybe, just maybe, if things had gone differently, might have been something, but even before he gave up on hope he had given up on what ifs.

The icing on the cake had been Renee. Just when he thought he could find someone her ex waltzed back in and, how had he put it? One thing lead to a mother, was what he thought were his exact words, hurtful words, but true ones. She was the straw that broke the camels back. It was almost as if someone was preparing him for this.

And now he lost the last thing he had left, his job. A job he hadn't even wanted in the first place, a job he had gone into only to avoid having to halfway around the globe and die. There were points in his life where he wondered what would have been different if maybe he hadn't switched his major, if he would have even lived to see this day, but he had long since stopped thinking about that, hope had taken the place of what ifs and regrets in his mind.

He didn't think anything would go right anymore, he had no more hope left that things would go well. The only thing that kept him going was his spite and his cynicism. The only reason he was sitting on the rooftop and not flinging himself off of it was his desire to prove to the world that no matter how many times hope kicked him down, he kept on going, spiting hope after so many others would have just given in. He only wished hope was a tangible thing so that he could scream at it that no matter what it tried, he wouldn't give it the pleasure it wanted.

But he had long since stopped believing in hope. Another tumbler of scotch was poured and another one drank while he toasted all the poor fools below him who were still addicted to hope thinking that things would get better and that their lives would ever resemble their dreams.


End file.
